John Powys - Ducdame

Two moths, of the species known to entomologists as yellow-underwings, flew into the room together and fluttered straight into one of the candles. Hastings gazed at them without moving; but Rook, springing up from his place, began a series of frantic efforts to catch them in his fingers. He stood by the table, making desperate clutching movements with his hands, while his companion, pushing back his chair a little, watched him gravely and silently.

One of the moths was caught at last, and going to the window Rook threw it, rather than released it, into the embalmed darkness outside. By the time he returned to the table, however, the other moth was lying singed and dead beside the candlestick.

“Why didn’t you catch it?” he cried indignantly; and the sudden consciousness of what had really happened — of those two feathered amorists moving together over the dark currant bushes in a mysterious ecstasy; of their being drawn toward a flame that desired them not and indeed knew not of their existence; of their being separated with an absolute and final separation; of the one he had thrown out fumbling vaguely with its antennæ in that immense darkness, from under the shadow of a peony leaf or a dock leaf; fumbling and uttering — who knows? — lamentations and moanings that would sound like the voice of Eros himself if there were ears that could hear it — struck like a spear into Rook’s brain.

He went to the window, closed it with a violent gesture, and throwing himself down with a groan into the creaking cane chair, rabbed his face with his hands.

“It’s getting too much for me, Hastings,” he said, “It’s getting altogether too much for me! What qualities ought one to have to be happy in a world like this? Ay? Ay? What has Lexie got, for instance? Courage? A lust for life? A mania for the wretchedest flicker of consciousness, as long as it is consciousness? Oh, I would like to escape from the whole thing! To escape out of it, I tell you, clear, clear out of it!”

Hastings surveyed the agitated man with a concentrated frown. This interview was beginning to break up the misty veil of more natural human feeling which of late had been forming, like an attenuated film, over the dark river of his thought. The plummet thrown out by Rook’s pessimism reached the surface of that formidable undercurrent and stirred its waters.

“Why do you say ‘escape’?” he asked sternly. “The longing to ‘escape’ is only the other side of the lust to enjoy. It’s as old as the hills, that ‘clear, clear out of it!’ and it’s as feeble as a baby’s wail.” He looked at Ashover more gently now, as he felt within him, rising up from the depths, the pride of his own life illusion as opposed to the other’s.

Ashover, too, felt, man-like, the challenge of a conflicting system of metaphysicalized self-assertion, and a gleam of interest in their discussion broke the gloom of his mood.

“Well? What do you do, Hastings, when you feel the turn of the great screw?”

“I never feel its turn, Ashover! I have nothing in me to resist it and therefore I can’t feel it. We’re talking in different languages.”

Rook smiled. “I’ve always wanted to ask you what that book of yours is really about. It seems to me that this is a moment when I may do that.”

The theologian got up. He walked to the window and opened it wide. Then he came back to the table and blew out both the flames.

“We needn’t burn any more moths,” he said in a low voice. “You and I can see enough of each other without candles.”

He resumed his seat and the two men sat silently in their places in that perfumed darkness. There was a syringa bush by the garden gate and the smell of its flowers mingled with the less definite scent of the wide-stretching hayfields. There was a faint dampness in the air from the neighbourhood of so many water brooks, but this only had the effect of making the darkness larger and cooler and more liberating.

William Hastings gathered up within him those obscure magnetic forces to which human beings give the names of “will” and “thought” and “purpose.” There flowed into the resultant complex of his energy, as the two sat silently there, a desire to undermine the very foundations of this proud, alien, inaccessible soul that lay chafing and fretting before him with this ridiculous wound in its heart. He felt no pity, no sympathy; but the obscure malice which had been slowly accumulating within him for many months took the form now of a longing to overcome the creature’s remoteness and detachment, to invade it, to overwhelm it, to drown its rock base and carry it away on the torrent of his own stronger, more formidable identity.

With a movement of his fingers that was much more rapid and nervous than usual he struck a match with the mechanical intention of lighting a cigarette. The little burst of sulphurous flame illuminated his own bent head; and at the same time brought his companion’s face up out of what seemed an abyss of nebulous darkness. He shook the flame into extinction and threw the match-end away.

“There’s no pleasure in smoking when you can’t see the smoke,” he said.

“Well? Are you going to tell me about your book?” repeated the other.

There was a moment’s deep silence between them that lay upon the filmy folds of the darkness like a dead child upon a woman’s lap.

“Ashover! ” The word seemed to come from a portion of the man’s being that was behind and beyond his mere physical frame.

“Well? What is it?”

“Do you realize that there is a hidden struggle going on in the depths — an appalling struggle — between two Powers that are beyond man and beyond Nature?”

“I certainly do not,” muttered Rook sullenly.

“One of these Powers is the life force,” weat on the priest. “The other is the death force. And what I have come to realize lately is this: that just as man can put himself into the magnetic matrix of life and germinate new creations, so he can also unchain the cogwheel and break the mainspring in that ultimate darkness! In other words, Ashover, I have found out that the soul of man is a much more dangerous weapon than is usually imagined.”

“All this sounds to me very like what I’ve heard in church,” remarked Rook grimly.

“It is like that!” cried the priest, “It is! It is! But that only shows that what I’ve discovered answers to an indestructible instinct in the human race.”

“The human race is not much of a criterion,” grumbled the voice in the cane chair. “It swings east by north; and then it swings west by south. It’s a bloody weathercock, your race instinct!”

“It hasn’t swung much for the last five thousand years on this matter,” retorted the other. “Against all the claptrap of science it has steadily maintained the one great appalling truth that men and gods and all the living things in nature are only pawns and dice and counters in a conflict between two equal and unfathomable antagonists! Haven’t you yourself felt it, Ashover?” His voice dropped to a penetrating whisper which pierced the darkness like a conspirator’s dagger. “Haven’t you felt that everything you consciously thought and did had behind it something else; gave way into something; just as broken ice gives way? And haven’t you felt that this something was sometimes life and sometimes death? Haven’t you felt that kind of thing, Ashover?”

Rook’s voice out of the darkness had the sort of tone a floating tree trunk might have had, as it knocked against another, on the dark tide of a swirling river.

“My good man,” he said, “I’ve felt so often every kind of sickening sensation that I’ve lost the spirit to tabulate them. I don’t see why you should stop at this duality of yours. Why not take it for granted that the universe is crowded with levels, strata, planes, dimensions, altitudes, regions, all of them full of wretched sensitive beings like ourselves longing to escape?”